“As a single 42-year-old friend put it, for many women it’s a Catch-22. “If I’d settled at thirty-nine,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.” “Nancy, who is married to the “predictable” guy, explained it like this: “I think the difference between women who get married and women who don’t is that women who don’t get married never give up the idea that they’re going to marry Brad Pitt, and it never occurs to them that they might not get married at all. They may say, ‘I’m never going to meet anyone,’ but that’s just like saying, ‘Oh, I’m fat’ when you don’t believe you are. It’s something women just say, in a self-deprecating way. When you’re young you’re always meeting guys, so deep down you believe that The One will suddenly show up. It doesn’t occur to you that maybe it’s okay if The One doesn’t look like Brad Pitt and earn a gazillion dollars and make your knees go weak every time you’re together. Well, it occurred to me, but not until I was thirty-five.” “His 32-year-old colleague Dan laughed—he’d been there before. “Women never want what’s available,” he said. “If they can’t find the perfect guy at thirty, they move on to find something better. But they don’t learn from this. Even if they’re still alone five years later, they get pickier. Then they’re almost forty and they haven’t found the perfect guy, so they start to regret having broken up with us, but now we’re not interested in them anymore.” “I think the reason some women have an inflated view of themselves is that in high school, they really did have the power, so they grow up thinking it will always be that way. And even in their twenties, they still do, to some extent, because they’re so in demand. A guy will spend all of his money courting her, investing in the relationship, and then one day she’ll suddenly say, ‘You know, you’re a great guy, but I’m just not feeling like this is what I want.’ “In their thirties,” he continued, “it’s the opposite. The girl gives the guy free sex, thinking she’s investing in the relationship that will lead to marriage, but then the guy, who is now the one in demand, suddenly says, ‘You know, I think you’re great, but you’re not who I want to marry.’ And the women are shocked, because guys used to worship them, but the balance of power has changed.” “Instead, I started to see a pattern that went like this: We grew up believing that we could “have it all.” “Having it all” meant that we shouldn’t compromise in any area of life, including dating. Not compromising meant “having high standards.” The higher our standards, the more “empowered” we were. But were we? Here’s what actually happened: Empowerment somehow became synonymous with having impossible standards and disregarding the fact that in real life, you can’t get everything you want, when you want it, on your terms only. Which is exactly how many of us empowered ourselves out of a good mate.” “Finally, three years after Dave’s proposal, Jessica found his number through the medical school switchboard and got up the nerve to call him. Her heart was pounding when she heard his voice. “The second he answered,” she said, “it felt like home again. I almost cried.” But then, as she told him why she called, Dave went silent. Now it was Jessica’s turn to have her heart broken. Dave had spent more than two years trying to get over Jessica, and finally, about eight months before, he’d met someone new. They were dating exclusively. She was a year older than Dave—a 27-year-old resident at the hospital—and was looking to meet the man she would marry. Dave is now married to this woman and both are pediatricians. Jessica learned through a mutual college friend that they recently had a son. Jessica’s voice cracked as she spoke. “I gave him up because it was drilled into me that first you establish your own life, then you share it with someone else. That first you go out and pursue your dreams. Well, here I am, still dreaming I’ll meet someone as great as Dave.” “I could relate to Jessica’s story. I also grew up believing that my early twenties were a time to experiment with different careers and different men and then suddenly, according my time table, The Guy would arrive on my doorstep. I didn’t even consider looking for a spouse in any serious way in my early or mid-twenties—when I was, in fact, most desirable in the dating pool. The goal was to go out and become “self-actualized” before marriage. I didn’t imagine that one day I’d be self-actualized but regretful. Nor did Jessica. “I thought the message was, ‘You can have it all—but not at twenty-three,’ ” she said. “But now that I’m twenty-nine and I’m supposed to have it all, I don’t. I had it at twenty-three! The problem is that people judge you if you marry too early, but then if you end up single at thirty or thirty-five, they judge you for not being married.” “When I asked several women what “feminism” meant, I got a lot of responses that boiled down to having the same opportunities as men. But the more we talked, the more we came up against the fact that our needs are different and that we might not, in fact, want the same things. And when it comes to dating, we don’t have the same opportunities as men, especially as we get older.” “By the time you put one guy through a successful marriage and another through the mill of dating and failed relationships, they’re different kinds of guys. That’s what’s different about dating older people. They tend to be more jaded. They’re not as hopeful and appealing as younger single people tend to be.” I told Greenwald that I didn’t consider these factors when I was ten years younger and waiting for just the right guy to pop into my life. It seemed reasonable to think that the longer I searched, the better the guy I’d end up with. But it’s faulty logic, she said: The longer you wait, the less likely you are to find someone better than you’ve already met.” “There’s a difference between what makes for a good boyfriend and what makes for a good husband. Over the years, stability and dependability outrank fireworks and witty banter.” “Look,” she said, “I’ll say the same thing to you that I say to younger women who don’t want to hear this. I say, ‘If you keep doing what you’re doing, what’s going to change? You don’t want to be thirty and the next day you’re forty-five and thinking, what have I done with my days?’ Because, as you know, it gets harder.” I did know. But I still had trouble with “shorter, older, with kids, and not gorgeous.” Not because I think I’m so fabulous (after all, I’m also shorter, older, with a kid, not gorgeous) but because it’s hard, as a woman, not to have drilled into you the notion that no matter how objectively ordinary you may be, somehow you “deserve” to be with the crème de la crème of male companionship. Read any article on dating on a woman-oriented Web site and in women’s magazines, or check out advice books marketed to single women, and you’ll read things like “You deserve to be with a man who pays.” “You deserve a man who always puts you first.” “You deserve to be with a man who rubs your feet at night.” And of course[…]” “To be fair, single men can be maximizers, too. Who doesn’t know the guy who dates a string of seemingly wonderful women but can’t commit to any of them? Still, Schwartz said the problem isn’t these men, per se. It’s that many women waste their time going after these men while overlooking satisficer men who can make them happy. Often maximizer women are dating maximizer men, only to find them wanting or to have them find us wanting. Two picky people don’t make for a great couple. That’s part of the reason it’s often an illusion that if we just wait long enough, we’ll meet Mr. Right. The logic would be that the people left later on are “better” because they were so discriminating (after all, nobody was good enough so far). But just the opposite is probably true. The people who got married younger, who knew how to compromise and negotiate and sustain a marriage, are likely less demanding than those who felt they couldn’t find anyone good enough. They tend to be better partners and parents. They’re probably much more enjoyable to live with over the course of fifty years. All the more reason not only to[…]” “Maximizers consider this settling. They want an 8 on everything. Satisficers consider this a good deal. Ironically, it’s the maximizers who, years later, look at the satisficers—with their husbands and families and contentment in life—and say, “I wish I had what she has.” Well, it was there for the taking. The maximizers simply passed it up. After all, satisficing isn’t about settling for someone who doesn’t have the qualities you’re seeking. It’s about finding someone who is enough, as opposed to someone who is everything.” “As any economist will tell you, it’s all about supply and demand. The longer you hold out, the more the supply of available men goes down at the same time that their demand goes up and a woman’s marital value goes down. The result, for women, is like a really bad dating recession.” “In 2008, a Slate magazine article by Mark Gimein used an auction analogy to explain the low supply of men as women get older. If dating is like an auction, you’d think that the stronger bidders—the more appealing women—would “win.” Instead, Gimein says, the strong bidders are so confident in their ability to find a guy that they bid too late. While the strong bidders wait for the best possible prospect, the weak bidders—the less conventionally appealing women—bid earlier and more aggressively because they know they can be outbid. So what happens? More and more appealing men, rejected by the strong bidders, are taken off the dating market by the weak bidders. In the end, what’s left are the least appealing men—the ones even the weak bidders didn’t bid on!—along with the most appealing (but overly confident) women” “Where have all the appealing men gone?” Gimein writes. “Most of them married young—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.” “Women care so much about height,” he told me, “that to be as appealing as the average five foot ten man, I’d have to earn $40,000 more per year at my height of five feet nine.” Ariely found that a 5’4” man would need to make $229,000 more than a 6’ tall man to have equal appeal; a 5’6” man would need $183,000 more; a 5’10” man would need $32,000 more.” “Which is how this reverse power shift occurs: Guys in their twenties are like women in their forties. Women in their twenties are like guys in their forties.” “You can be as picky as you like, as long as you have the option of being that way,” Evan said. “When we think we should be in demand and we’re not, that’s where the friction comes in. What holds you back is that you’re trying to be the twenty-seven-year-old woman who’s at the top of the dating totem pole. A twenty-seven-year-old can pretty much date anyone—older, younger. But it won’t always be this way. That’s why no matter how old you are, you can’t afford to throw people away on a technicality.” But how do you know where you are on the totem pole? “It’s economics.” Evan shrugged. “A gallon of milk is good, but nobody will buy it at ten dollars. The product is priced too high. A lot of women are setting their price point so high that they’re pricing themselves out of the market.” He says that you can assess your market value this way: If you have an in-box full of responses from men you’ve e-mailed, you’re correctly priced. If you don’t, you’ve priced yourself too high.” “If a guy is forty and cute and makes a good living and wants to get married, it makes more sense for him to be with a thirty-two-year-old than a woman his own age,” Evan continued. “But a lot of us don’t adjust. We just say, ‘I’m valuable. This is what I’m willing to take. I’m only dating guys who are my age. I’m only dating men who are this tall.’ That’s a lovely declaration. But you may not have many buyers. I see a lot of younger women overpricing themselves, too, and when they finally price themselves more realistically five years later, it might be too late.” That’s exactly what I saw happening: Women under 30 might be dating a great guy, but there’s this one thing they think he’s lacking. They’re with an 8 but they want a 10. Then they’re 40 and they can only get a 5! So they gave up the 8 in order to hold out for the 10, only to end up with a 5—or nothing. The 8 would have been wonderful—the 8 is a catch—but it’s not until you can only get a 5 that you realize it” “In business terms, Evan says romantic market value works like this: “Saying you should hold out for a ten is like saying that everyone should hold out for a five-hundred-thousand-dollar salary because that’s what you’re worth. Well, if there’s only a small percentage of those five-hundred-thousand-dollar jobs out there, there’s going to be a lot of unemployment. That is, unless someone compromises and finds a lower-paying job—like a seven—that has much better benefits and quality of life.” Evan said that people who don’t take their own marketability into account are deluding themselves. “I would be more marketable if I were a millionaire,” he said. “Bill Gates would have an entirely different level of marketability if he weren’t Bill Gates. That goes against our ideals of love and being valued for your internal qualities only, and a lot of people find it offensive. Everyone wants to be thought of as special. But you can either pretend it isn’t true, or get more realistic about your options so you can actually meet someone.” “I called Madathil to ask about a study she’d done that surprised me. She compared satisfaction in arranged marriages and marriages of choice—both in the United States—and found that the people in arranged marriages were just as satisfied, if not more so, than those in marriages of choice. Now, I’m not so out of touch to think that arranged marriages are the solution to women’s dating problems, but I found Madathil’s study intriguing: Was it really possible that a guy your parents select for you could make you just as happy as the guy you spend years and years painstakingly searching for? If so, why? Madathil said that her study didn’t investigate why (that’s her next project), but she was happy to share the story of her own fourteen-year arranged marriage as an example.” “In my very American mind-set, I wondered why Madathil didn’t want to meet other candidates. After all, she told me that she could have met as many men as she wanted until she found the right match. How did she know to pick this one? “Well, there was nothing wrong with him,” she replied matter-of-factly. That sounded hilarious to me. “There was nothing wrong with him” isn’t the reasoning most single American women use when it comes to marriage decisions. (In fact, often we seem to find something wrong with a guy.) Besides, based on what she’d just told me, some women wouldn’t have gone on even a second date with Madathil’s husband—much less agreed to marriage—because there were no initial sparks. “I think what’s different from the coffee date is that we’re not looking for sparks or anything like that,” she said. “It’s more like on a friendship level, where you meet someone and you know pretty quickly whether you want to hang out with them again. Romance isn’t the primary focus in the beginning. It’s more about whether this is a good fit value-wise.” “Her advice to women who are dating is this: First find a good match, then fall in love. Above all, don’t think you’ve “fallen in love” only to learn too late that it’s a bad match. It seemed like good advice. After all, given the American obsession with falling in love immediately, why were so many people getting divorced or feeling empty in marriages that started out as “true love”?” “Zama believes that a lot of what makes arranged marriages work is the fact that the Hollywood version of “love” isn’t in the equation. He’s probably right. Our Western expectations of what “being in love” means seem to have so skewed what we value in a partner that many single women today, when asked what kind of guy they’re looking for, often say, “Someone tall, funny, and successful,” instead of “Someone warm, trustworthy, loyal, and who can compromise and handle life’s stresses well.” I was starting to wonder if arranged marriages were similar to those of people who say they got married because of “timing.” You know, people who were eager to get married and get on with their lives, and the next good enough person they dated became their spouse. It’s not an arranged marriage, exactly, but it’s certainly entered into with a very pragmatic eye.” “and if they’ve never been married by their mid-forties, often they come with some kind of baggage or issue. My friend Kayla, who’s 36, noticed the same thing. “At that age, if he seems like a catch, there’s a catch,” she said. “Never-married men in their forties are bad news—there’s something fishy there. I’ve found they have one of five tragic problems: mommy, addiction, gay, job, or commitment.” “Lisa Clampitt, the matchmaker in New York who used to be a social worker, told me that often what seems like “chemistry” might be emotional baggage from childhood. That’s why if she sees a client repeatedly going after men who aren’t working out, she looks at the psychological roots of the attraction. “Sometimes what people consider chemistry is actually a replay of what happened in their families,” Clampitt said. “So a person who had a workaholic father might grow up to be attracted to someone married or emotionally unavailable, and when someone’s available in a healthy way, she doesn’t feel the spark.” “Everyone wants a happy ending, right? Everyone wants to be reassured that they can find someone great no matter how old they are. But here’s the truth: A happy ending is always possible, but a happy ending for me is a lot less likely than—and will look a lot different from—a happy ending for someone ten years younger than me. The older you get, the more complicated dating becomes, and no amount of attitude adjustment can turn back the clock and change those realities. I’m not trying to bum people out. I’m trying to help. It’s kind of like those graphic anti-drunk driving public service announcements that show people crashing into poles and getting killed. If they just told you, “Don’t drink and drive,” you might think, “Yeah, I know, but I can have a couple of martinis, right?” It’s not until you see people ending up brain-dead, lying in a coma in the hospital and surrounded by beeping monitors, that the message has an impact. In the same way, if you don’t see how easily people can end up alone by making the dating mistakes I did, you won’t be dissuaded from making those same mistakes yourself” “I had to show the reality of being single at my age because I used to be like the teenager who thinks she’s invulnerable to drunk driving accidents—it’s all in the abstract, something that happens to other people, but would never happen to me. It never occurred to me that I would become another dating casualty. I had to show, in grim detail, the accident that my dating life became so that you could make choices you won’t look back on later and regret. So consider this a dating public service announcement: If you recognized yourself in this book, I’m the ghost of what could happen to you if you don’t broaden your idea of Mr. Right. I mean that nicely, because it’s actually an optimistic message: If you’re older like me, it’ll be harder, but at least you’ll have a better chance of finding a great guy if you change your approach. And if you’re single in your twenties or thirties and wondering why, now you know not just why, but what to do to increase your chances of having a happy long-term marriage.” “So what I’m saying is, hey, you—yes, you. In the pink shirt. I’m talking to you. This isn’t supposed to make you feel crummy. It’s supposed to be eye-opening. Not thinking you’re above it all makes you more self-aware, and self-awareness leads to better decisions. It puts you in a better position to get what you want. Denying it leaves you dating the way you always have, which so far hasn’t worked out. If you’re single, and not wanting to be, and you’re reading this and thinking it’s not about you—maybe it isn’t. I’ll give you that. But are you sure? Are you making smart, conscious decisions about the men you let into your life? The good news is, if you want something different, it’s available to you. It might take some time to change, but that’s okay because how many years did it take you to develop these sabotaging attitudes in the first place? Ten years ago, nobody told me the things I learned in the course of writing this book—or, if they did, I didn’t listen. You can’t fault anyone for not telling you, but you can blame yourself for not listening.” Excerpt From Marry Him Lori Gottlieb https://www.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough/dp/045123216X/ref=nodl_?
Why are all these post coming out?
Lonely holidays
No dating apps?
Lol if a woman won't settle at 30 then hope she has a big TC for all her cat food. Cause past 40 is single life forever
Curious what's the current sex ratio and average life age
I'd rather be alone that with someone like op I guess.
Lol wtf
I think it really depends on why the woman is single (and I say this as a woman in her 30s). I typically find that if a woman has been married or in LTRs of 4+ years she can find someone again, if she feels like dating, because she knows relationships take work and what sort of work they require and can pick good partners. If she’s only been in relationships of 1-2 years or less typically I find they do tend to have some strange idealistic issues. People are single at various ages for all sorts of reasons - in my experience it’s not that they’re single that means there’s definitely something wrong with them, it’s their relationship track record that’s more important
"in my experience it’s not that they’re single that means there’s definitely something wrong with them, it’s their relationship track record that’s more important" Well said.
Your are just drowning yourself in misery. Look at people as humans and not as men or women. When you meet someone who mutually wants to spend there time and life with you, it'll happen. Either ways marrying won't be your choice, man or woman. It'll be staring right in front of you, and it will be hard to ignore it - then you marry, for bad or for good.
The women in this thread proving OP right lol. You can’t make this up 😂😂😂
Well would be nice to see gentlemen and not incels having to prove op right. Atleast women now have that choice . the incels on here would have no options than have the same fate dumped on them .
I don’t understand, what do incels have to do with women not having the same quality of options at 45 as they did at 25, and regretting not settling down earlier?
The reality is no one wants a Brad Pitt. He is a wife beater. Why do ppl assume that women want a Brad Pitt.
Imagine taking things literally
Age is irrelevant. The right answer is “when u find the right person not the perfect person but the right one”
Seems like the author followed the poll results and remained unmarried after the 12 years the book came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lori_Gottlieb
Look for her actions. Not her words. She's not that masochistic to put herself under duress. She obviously acted in her best interest.
She talks about that in the full article, how it’s super hard for her to date now that she’s older (even at the time of the book release she found it hard)
Anything after 33 is a no go
As in, marry someone by 33 or find someone to marry at that age?